Hackaday – One Instruction to Rule Them All: C Compiler Emits only MOV

How many instructions do you need to successfully compile C code? Let’s see, you’d need some jump instructions, some arithmetic functions, and — of course — move instructions, right? Turns out you only need the move instruction, which — on x86, at least — is Turing complete.
While the effort is a bit tongue-in-cheek, we have to admit that if you were trying to create your own CPU, this would make for a simple architecture and might have power or complexity advantages, so maybe someone will find a practical use for it after all. If you wanted a C compiler for a simple CPU, this wouldn’t require much to emulate at a byte-code level, either.

How does it…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/21/one-instruction-to-rule-them-all-c-compiler-emits-only-mov/